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Here’s what you’ll learn as you read this story:
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In 1918, a mysterious red pigment was found in the bones of 12 soldiers who were hastily buried.
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The grave was built in a five-foot-deep pit left by a wartime explosion, and the bodies were covered only by a thin layer of soil.
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The research team studied the soil and the surrounding site to determine the cause of the red spots.
At about 7,000 feet in Caddy, on the border of the Italian Alps, 12 Austro-Hungarian soldiers were buried in a mass grave during World War I. Now, only their bones remain—and more than 80% of them are marked with red spots. And now scientists know why.
In a study published in Scientific reportsA team of researchers from the Universities of Milan and Padua used taphonomic analysis to study environmental factors from the time the remains were buried in June 1918 during what the Italian army called Operation Avalanche.
Combining scientific data with wartime diary accounts of events, the researchers opened up fresh insights into the hastily developed cemetery and discovered a red-colored root: juniper root.
“This multidisciplinary approach provides valuable insights into the unusual taphonomic patterns of alpine settings,” the authors wrote, “with applications across a range of forensic and archaeological scenarios.”
The skeletal remains of 12 soldiers aged 18 to 35 were poorly preserved in a shallow grave — which was actually a crater caused by an explosion caused by a thin layer of soil sprinkled over the body — possibly due to acidic soil conditions. The researchers discovered that the reddish-purple spots were produced by a pigment called phlobophanes in the roots of nearby juniper plants. Juniper plants were planted in the graves and attached to the remains, along with the dye, sometimes even penetrating the inner layers of the bones.
“Red juniper roots forming hard layers were often associated with areas of pink/purple staining in the skeletal material,” the authors wrote.[and] As foramina and scarring were seen to invade the medullary cavities, the association between the two phenomena was strongly supported. Given the acidic nature of the soil at the site, pigments may have been leached from juniper roots, and with runoff produced by rainfall and ice/snow melt in the high-attitude region of Sima Caddy, pigments traveled through the soil and deposited on the skeletal remains.
These large, wine-colored roots weren’t the only dramatic detail researchers discovered about the grave in the alpine meadow. A wartime diary account of the funeral indicated that it was a hasty attempt. Scientists confirmed this picture with evidence from cold-weather blowflies and high-elevation geological sites. A special blowfly found in the grave lays its eggs only on exposed remains, indicating that at some point the bones were left exposed, or that a thin layer of soil was blown away or pushed away.
The best-preserved remains were still bound in leather shoes, although the researchers determined that the skin-touched bones were also strangely eroded, supporting the authors’ position that the environment did not passively hold the remains, but actively reshaped them.
Further examination of the bones showed that three soldiers had sustained high-velocity projectile trauma and two had blast or projectile trauma. Along with the written description of the rapid burial, the authors concluded that a combination of botanical, entomological, and taphonomic evidence provides a complete reconstruction of the history of the 1918 event.
“These unusual findings provide valuable insight into the sequence of events leading to the burial of the victims,” the authors wrote. “This study provides important insights into how the complex interplay of taphonomic elements can enable a more accurate reconstruction of events associated with mass graves, in particular, confirming a wartime event that occurred over a century ago.”
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